Satellite is up in a few minutes so I’d better prepare today’s
post. Been jonesing for a bath the last couple of days. Those 1-2
minute showers every couple of days are getting old.

We have a massive exodus of IceCube drillers leaving in a few minutes
(all but one, 21 in all) on today’s passenger flight. Hopefully they
won’t get stuck in McMurdo — the C-17 from Christchurch has apparently
boomeranged two days in a row due to weather in Mac Town. Or rather
two nights in a row, since they are still doing night flights to
McMurdo. I feel bad for those people who have had to get up in the
middle of the night several days in a row. Unfortunately I too will
probably have a night (or early morning) flight to Christchurch in a
week, unless the weather gets a lot colder.

I had planned originally to spend some posts explaining what IceCube
was and what exactly we’re doing. I guess I haven’t really done that
yet. I apologize to any readers who haven’t already heard me babble at
length about neutrinos in person; this may seem to you like an even
more random and strange endeavor than it already is. A detailed
description of our tasks here right now would probably be too
technical anyways. But a simple explanation that might suffice for now
is that we are testing the new equipment installed this year, both
deep in the ice (the final seven “strings” of light sensors, deployed
about a mile and a half below the surface), and the new computers in
the IceCube Lab on the surface, and, most crucially, getting
everything to talk to each other and perform the initial checks that
everything is working OK. After we leave, two winter-over scientists
will remain behind to run the experiment throughout the Austral
Winter, supported by a scrum of experts in the North who will reach
down over the satellite, perform periodic calibrations and software
upgrades, and generally help if/when things break from time to time.

I had expected to use some of my time here to beat down my backlog of
features to add and bugs to fix in my primary project (“IceCube Live,”
a server used to control the experiment and a Web site used to monitor
it). I have done some of that, but in reality most of my time has been
spent helping other people here… which, I suppose, is really how it
should be.